I was home sick from work today. I watched TV and goofed around on the computer. In the process, I found an interesting interview with comedian/actor/producer Larry David from some comedy magazine. I think it was called Laugh Factory. It says it was done in 1994.
I’ve gotten it into my head, as I sit here watching Gilligan’s Island with a fever, that I’d like to interview Larry David for Crimewave. From what I’ve read so far, it doesn’t look as though he does interviews that often. I suppose he sets the bar pretty high. Then again, he did apparently do this interview with Laugh Factory. Crimewave USA can’t be that many rungs away from Laugh Factory magazine on the ladder of respectability.
Larry David now does a show on HBO called Curb Your Enthusiasm. Before that he was an executive producer and writer on Seinfeld. He also happens to be the guy that the character of George Costanza is based on. In addition to being brilliant and funny, he’s an unapologeticly selfish, egocentric son-of-a-bitch.
Here’s a bit of the interview I found.
LF: What about stand-up? Do you miss it at all?
LD: Well, as you know, I’m really only happy when I’m on stage. I just feed off the energy of the audience. That’s what I’m all about — people and laughter.
LF: I’ll take that as a no.
LD: Yeah, I’d much rather be on stage talking to a couple of retards for twenty bucks than sitting at my desk thinking up jokes for…well let’s say a few dollars more.
LF: You always had a reputation, deservedly so, of the ultimate comic’s comic. The one guy who all the other comedians would run into the room to see.
LD: You’re saying I sucked.
If you want to see the entire interview, you can check it out here.
My respect for Larry David borders on something less attractive.
I’m just a step away from being as pathetic as this woman. She’s built an entire web page around her single-minded and completely unfunny pursuit to become an “unpaid” writer for Curb Your Enthusiasm. I’d quote some of it here, but it’s too painful. There’s nothing worse than a web page, complete with images of balloons and confetti, that keeps going on and on for pages about how funny some amateur comedian is… without saying one thing even remotely humorous.
I hope that someone would stop me before I hit comedy rock bottom.
Lenny Bruce made a more graceful exit.
google zeitgeist
I wonder where “Stanley Tucci nude gallery” and “skateboarder sock fetish” finish in the annual Google ratings?
Have you seen this? It’s pretty cool. It’s a report based on information gathered from all of the searches run on Google over the course of the past year. You can watch trends rise, move from continent to continent and eventually taper off to nothing. Maybe you have to be a marketing person to really get excited about this stuff, but I find it fascinating. I think someone else may have already coined the phrase “InfoPorn.” If they haven’t, they should have. That’s what this is. It’s Swank for marketers.
gary shandling: funny, dead, funny again
I just read a little piece in Esquire by Gary Shandling. He mentions in it that he almost died in a car accident when he was 27. He claims to have seen a bright light and heard a voice that asked him something like, “Are you done living the life of Gary Shandling?” He answered, “No” and went on to do great stuff like The Larry Sanders Show. According to Shandling, this near-death episode has informed his every decision from then on.
I suppose there’s a chance that he made that up, but I didn’t get the impression from the rest of the piece that that was the case. My guess is that it really happened, or at least that really is his memory of events.
Not that I want to almost die, but I think it would be pretty cool to be given an opportunity to see that something better is waiting for us after death. Maybe then I could stop worrying so much and get on with things here.
On the subject of Gary Shandling, I heard him, in a tribute to the comedian Gallager, once tell the story of how he as a young high school student drove for hours to see Gallager perform and then asked to meet him after the show. He said that Gallager was extremely generous with his time and sat for some unbelievable number of hours, discussing the business of professional comedy with the young Shandling. I’ve never been the biggest Gallager fan, but I thought that was pretty cool. It’s not everyone who, at the top their game who would sit down for over an hour with a young (ugly) kid (that he didn’t want to sleep with) and shoot the shit. I thought that was cool.
(When I wrote that last paragraph, I couldn’t remember George Carlin’s name, so I substituted Gallager’s as a place-holder. Now that I remember his name though, I don’t want to change it. I like the image of a young, awkward Gary Shandling seeking out the experienced master of Sledge-O-Matic. (In the story though, it really was George Carlin that gave the young Shandling pointers. I thought that was cool.))
mac pride
I love stories about how cool people who own Macs are. This is a great one. It’s about how a group of Mac users that band together to fight crime… kind of. Mac’s aside, it’s actually a pretty good story about people utilizing the internet to accomplish what the local Chicago police could not. Bottom line: the internet can be cool, and even empowering.
trent lott ass hole
I know it’s been in the news a lot these last few days, but I think it bears repeating.
In case you’ve been in seclusion, here’s what Senator Trent Lott said at Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party:
“I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.”
Here’s a clip from a good Washington Post article on the subject.
It was not “a poor choice of words,” as he later pleaded. It was a perfectly clear choice of words articulating a perfectly clear idea. Had Lott stopped with Thurmond-for-president, 1948, this might have been written off as idle and presumably insincere birthday flattery for a very, very old man. But Lott did not stop there. He added, fatally, that America would have been better off had it embraced Dixiecrat segregation. With that, Lott cut off any retreat.
my poor old broken brain
I had another one of my headaches last night. They usually come twice a year, but this was the second time in December. I’ve convinced myself that I have a brain tumor the size of an eggplant trying to push its way out through my left eye-hole. I’m trying not to let it bother me though.
I can’t fucking stand my migraines. I’ll just be sitting there watching TV one minute and then the next I won’t be able to focus. It’s not quite that I can’t focus really, but that’s as close as I can come to describing it. It’s like I can still see everything, but that the pieces don’t all fit together. Does that make sense?
Last night, I was eating my sandwich, drinking my beer and watching Bernie Mac, when everything started to slip. I can tell it’s starting when I look that the “FOX” insignia in the bottom right corner of the screen and can’t make out what it says.
“Fuck!”
At that point I know it’s coming. I sit there for a while, blinking my eyes and hoping it will stop, but it doesn’t. Things stop making sense, and then the yellow and purple line of flashing lights come in.
Linette wants me to go see this guy for my migraines and my anxiety.
(There was a photo here of the Dr. but Linette suggested that I take it off.)
She knows someone who knows him. She says he’s good, “if you believe in stuff like this.” I figure it might be worth a shot. I just listened to his show on anxiety (it’s archived on his site) and he sounds like he knows what he’s talking about.
If nothing else, a visit would give me something to talk about here. That’s the great thing about this site. Nothing is “wasted” now. Every bad event has potential. I’m not necessarily looking forward to the prostate exam that’s looming in the not too distant future (my doctor said I’d have to have my first one at 35), but it’s no longer wholly terrifying. I can picture myself now, jogging away from his office, toward a web terminal.
it’s gotta be bad when even the dumb asses see change is needed
It’s too little, too late, but the Bush White House just called for better SUV fuel efficiency. Actually, I think they’re only calling for an increase of something like six miles per gallon by 2005. From what I’ve read lately, that won’t even bring us back to our average fuel efficiency rates of last year.
What we need is a comprehensive energy plan that sees us pouring all of our resources into the exploration of alternative fuels. We need something along the lines of a Manhattan Project for alternative fuels. Instead, Baby Bush gives us SUVs that’ll get another six miles to the gallon in two years.
Here’s an article on the new Bush initiative.
who’s in there?
And why is it, while we’re on the subject of energy policy, that we can’t know who met with our Vice President when he was drafting our nation’s energy policy. I don’t get that.
Here’s a little bit from an article on the subject:
The fight began on May 7, 2001, when Representatives John D. Dingell of Michigan and Henry A. Waxman of California, the senior Democrats on two House committees, asked Mr. Walker to investigate the “conduct and composition of the task force,” which they suggested had met with “political contributors to discuss specific policies, rules, regulations and legislation.” The two congressmen went to the accounting office because they had no hope that a committee of the Republican-controlled House would demand the information.
That spring the task force publicly issued its policy recommendations, which were generally supported by the energy industry and emphasized an increase in oil and gas exploration on public land and the building of more power plants and transmission lines. The policy was submitted to Congress but stalled in the Senate.
Three months after Mr. Dingell and Mr. Waxman approached the accounting office, Mr. Cheney argued in a memorandum to Congress that the inquiry violated the separation of powers laid out in the Constitution. “A president and his senior advisers,” the vice president said then, “must be able to work in an atmosphere that respects confidentiality of communications if the president is to get the good, candid advice and other information upon which wise decision-making depends.”
There’s probably a more recent article somewhere else, but I liked this one that ran in the NY Times a few days ago.
there’s someone for everyone
or we all have it in us to make good german food
The German newspaper Bild reported that a man from Berlin recently replied to an on-line advertisement which read: “Seeking young, well-built men aged 18 to 30 to slaughter.”
As the ad promised, the man, a computer engineer, was slaughtered. According to some news stories I’ve heard, he sat down and shared a meal of his own penis with his killer before he was actually done in and butchered. All of this is apparently on videotape. Apparently the killer was caught after running the ad for a second time.
poet eats beef
I overheard some people the other day, friends of friends, discussing a local Detroit poet who, with his wife/girlfriend, was known to eat an entire side of beef in four days time.
This has nothing to do with the guy in Germany.
I’m tired. There’s not time to proofread. Sorry. I’ll try to do better tomorrow. Goodnight.
